DLSS VS FSR In Call of Duty Vanguard and why both are necessary

Conclusions – Both FSR and DLSS are great additions to COD: Vanguard

Call of Duty Vanguard is one of the newest games to support both Nvidia’s DLSS technology and AMD’s FSR technology. While fanboys on both sides would like us to call one undeniably superior, the fact is that both deliver excellent results in this game. This is especially true when you compare DLSS and FSR to Call of Duty Vanguard’s integrated resolution scaler, which provides incredibly blurry results on PC. 

If you pressed us, we would call DLSS the overall winner in this comparison, as at lower input resolutions it delivers gameplay that has less aliasing. That said, both DLSS and FSR deliver increased aliasing in Call of Duty: Vanguard when used at their higher performance settings. 

When comparing DLSS’s Quality mode to FSR’s Ultra Quality mode at 4K (both of which deliver similar performance levels), it is hard to distinguish between the two. Both offer major performance gains over a natively rendered 4K resolution, and both are nigh indistinguishable from native 4K renderings. In Call of Duty Vanguard, DLSS and FSR are both viable options. Yes, DLSS has an edge in its higher performance modes, but that doesn’t mean that FSR doesn’t also deliver great results.  
  

  
While Nvidia’s DLSS technology has an edge over AMD’s FSR technology, the difference in quality between the two is minimal at 4K. While DLSS delivers better results in some instances, FSR supports a broader range of hardware, including Nvidia’s older GTX series graphics cards. 

Call of Duty Vanguard is a win for FSR as it showcases why FSR exists. FSR delivers higher-quality results than Call of Duty: Vanguard’s default resolution scaling technology and does so without utilising proprietary technologies that are limited to a specific subset to PC hardware. While we are sure that AMD will utilise AI technologies with future iterations of FSR, Call of Duty Vanguard highlights to us why FSR is a useful feature for developers and PC gamers alike. 

  
Upscalers are a win for everyone

Be it in the form of FSR or DLSS, resolution upscaling technologies are a huge win for gamers. DLSS and FSR allow PC gamers to stretch their hardware further, either by achieving higher framerates at high resolutions or by freeing up GPU headroom that can be invested in higher graphical settings like ray tracing or other computationally expensive features. 

In most instances, DLSS and FSR both offer Faux-K images that are practically indistinguishable from native 4K images when using their highest quality settings. That’s great news for PC gamers, especially those with expensive monitors. 

FSR’s Ultra Quality mode and DLSS’s Quality mode are both enough to allow our RTX 3070 Ti graphics card to achieve 60 FPS framerates at practically all times during Vanguard’s campaign, with cinematic scenes being the only possible exceptions. 80 FPS framerates are commonplace at 4K Ultra settings, making us wish that we have one of those fancy 4K 120Hz screens to play Vanguard with. Both FSR and DLSS are great options in Vanguard, though RTX users should use DLSS instead of AMD’s solution. 

You can join the discussion on Call of Duty: Vanguard’s DLSS and FSR implementations on the OC3D Forums.